Our lovely home is a furnished, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, second story apartment. We plan on keeping the first bedroom a guest room (if anyone wants to visit, seriously, stop on by!), and the second bedroom is our “office” where Ray will be doing school and I will be blogging/writing/organzing our ever growing collection of books.
The master bedroom is pretty nice, my favorite part is the closet space and the master bath! We’ve yet to live in a place with a bathroom attached, so I’m feeling pretty fancy right about now. Speaking of bathrooms, I love how the Koreans design their bathrooms (as most Asian cultures do) with what is called a “wet” bathroom, meaning that there are drains in the floor and they are slanted so any water that gets out of the shower/tub area just drains away. Same idea if the toilet ever overflows. I am also particularly fond of the shower head and wand combo. Can you imagine how easy it would be to bathe a child with one of these??? We’re so buying one to take back home with us next year.
Another neat feature in our home – the door. Koreans don’t use keys, they use keypads on everything. The front of the pad slides up and you punch in the code and the door unlocks. Our apartment also has a separate key-code to enter the building from the ground floor. Getting here was overwhelming since I was already learning the code for Ray’s dorm room door, my work’s codes and now my home! So many codes!
Koreans are very eco-friendly when it comes to waste. We have to buy special trash bags for our specific district and have to know what goes where. There is a bag for food scraps (orange) that can only be deposited in a special bin outside. (We learned that you save and discard your scraps of food because they will process it and feed it to the pigs here.) You must separate your recyclables into glass, plastic, paper, etc., and then anything that doesn’t fit those categories goes into a clear bag and gets deposited into a specially marked trash bin outside as well. You can only take your trash out between the hours of 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. (not sure why that is…). If you don't comply with these rules, you can be fined 1,000,000 won (~$1000).
Our apartment is not far at all from the base, so Ray walks or rides his bike to work. I have started my job nannying for another sweet family (another post to come soon on that!) and they have so generously given me use of their second car for the year! So I am the lucky duck that gets to drive to work every day. Monday was my first day driving to work (as opposed to taking a cab), and I definitely got lost to and from work. Haha… the roads here are lots of alleyways with very few street signs. Thank goodness for the “Waze” app that can just reroute me through another alley. I’m sure I’ll get more comfortable as time goes on, but for now I’m leaving 45 minutes early just to make sure I arrive on time (it should only take me 15 mins to get to work – I’m that bad).
The weather has been great so far! We haven't needed to use our A.C. unit (the crazy white machine in the picture of our living room.) When it gets colder we will use our heated floors - yes, you read that right - heated floors! There are pipes under the floors which heat the floors and warm the rest of the house. I am embarrassingly excited to use it soon.
It’s been pretty foggy here in the mornings and evenings, which if you know me, totally freaks me out. We walked to the base the other day and I couldn’t get over how beautiful and how creepy it looks out this way! We live further from the busier side of town, which is nice for noise and traffic. There are lots of rice paddies and windy roads out our way. One of these days when we’re both off work on the same day we’ll go find out what’s down those roads. For now, they will remain “in the fog.”
So that's our home! I will post more pictures once we have made it homey and have decorated a little. Thanks for checking it out!
-K